Now I get a bank-subsidized thing and you're not missing any money. It creates a drag on the whole economy, because instead of doing productive work to get the thing, it's often easier to play games with the system.

The fact that credit cards use a symmetric key to authorize spend is a glaring flaw. The technology to fix it (asymmetric key cryptography) has been around for decades. But instead of fixing it, the credit card companies just keep writing off the instances of fraud.